On Mon, 28 May 2007, Srivatsa Vaddagiri wrote:
>
> So is it settled now on what approach we are going to follow (freezer
> vs lock based) for cpu hotplug? I thought that Linus was not favouring
> freezer
> based approach sometime back ..
As far as I'm concerned, we should
- use "preempt_disable()" to protect against CPU's coming and going
- use "stop_machine()" or similar that already honors preemption, and
which I trust a whole lot more than freezer.
- .. especially since this is already how we are supposed to be protected
against CPU's going away, and we've already started doing that (for an
example of this, see things like e18f3ffb9c from Andrew)
It really does seem fairly straightforward to make "__cpu_up()" be called
through stop_machine too. Looking at _cpu_down:
mutex_lock(&cpu_bitmask_lock);
p = __stop_machine_run(take_cpu_down, NULL, cpu);
mutex_unlock(&cpu_bitmask_lock);
and then looking at _cpu_up:
mutex_lock(&cpu_bitmask_lock);
ret = __cpu_up(cpu);
mutex_unlock(&cpu_bitmask_lock);
I just go "Aww, wouldn't it be nice to just make that "__cpu_up()" call be
done through __stop_machine_run() too?"
Hmm?
Then, you could get the "cpu_bitmask_lock" if you need to sleep, but if
you don't want to do that (and quite often you don't), just doing a
"preempt_disable()" or taking a spinlock will *also* guarantee that no new
CPU's suddenly show up, so it's safe to look at the CPU online bitmasks.
Do we really need anything else?
As mentioned, it's actually fairly easy to add verification calls to make
sure that certain accesses are done with preemption disabled, so..
Linus
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